Products Of A Very Fancy Charm
by SiriuslyPeeved
Summary: On his hundred-and-first birthday, Harry Potter receives help and guidance from an unexpected source: the portraits in his office at Hogwarts. Far-future, epilogue-compliant. Formerly titled "Portraits."


**Disclaimer:** Everything you recognize belongs to J.K. Rowling and her publishers.

**Author's Note:** Written for Gluttony's First Birthday Challenge. Big thanks to my friends from Gluttony and eHPF who provided such helpful reviews.

**July, 2081**

The thirty-first of July began with a thunderstorm. Harry Potter, Headmaster of Hogwarts School, sat up in bed with a cooling cup of tea by his side. He used the night to collect himself, to go over the next day's activities, to catch up on his reading. Hogwarts was quiet enough in the summer time: too quiet. Harry rather liked the clamor of children, the appalling noises of charms gone wrong, and the provoking shrieks of Peeves, stalwart poltergeist.

Books and magazines spread across the fine, silk coverlet. Their sober, scholarly cover illustrations did not preen or make up to the viewer, but rather, assumed moody, knowing expressions. They wanted to be the best, to be highly thought of. Harry felt he had long outgrown such a need. He had taken the position of Headmaster because he didn't quite know what else to do with himself. Harry and Ginny were married nearly eighty years: far more time than he ever thought he might have, when a seventeen-year-old boy had walked knowingly to his own death.

_I didn't even say good-bye,_ he always remembered. _How lucky, how amazingly lucky I was to return._

Ginny had died suddenly at the beginning of August, almost a year before. Harry had simply gone upstairs, all the way up to Sirius' old room at the top of twelve Grimmauld Place, where he wouldn't be bothered by anyone. Two young house-elves, brother and sister, had taken care of him as best they could, but he had refused to see anybody else. Harry's brushy, silver hair grew long, falling down to cover the puckered, lightning-shaped scar on his forehead.

The Potter and Weasley families staged a mass rebellion. They wouldn't let Gramps dwindle and fade away, not when Albus Dumbledore had lived a vigorous life to a hundred and sixteen. Harry knew better, and so did Hermione, but she pestered him all the same.

The busybodies had put their heads together, and fronted the idea of Harry becoming Headmaster when Neville Longbottom passed away. Another sorrow, Neville's going. Harry had lived long enough to watch most of his friends die before him. First Ron, then Neville, then Ginny. Being left behind was enough to leave Harry's heart feeling worn down, rubbed raw as if with coarse sandpaper.

The more powerful the wizard, the longer-lived, or so he'd been told. Not for the first time, Harry Potter wished with all his heart to be ordinary.

In the weeks after Ginny's death, Hermione's letters grew more shrill in tone. Finally, she broke out the Howlers. Literally driven from his own home by the racket, Harry agreed to talk to the Minister about the position at Hogwarts. There was a kind of relief in the decision, in knowing that he would have a productive place in the world once again.

Hermione went around like a Cheshire cat for the next few months, smug in her success. Harry didn't try to stop her. He loved her too much not to let her enjoy her little triumph.

The rain continued outside, punctuated by vivid green flashes. Vestigial instinct brought Harry out of bed. His wand leaped to his right hand, and his body contorted into a painfully unused fighting stance. Thunder crashed again. Harry chuckled at himself and straightened his arthritic hip. How old Mad-Eye would have laughed. Harry started to close the window with a subtle wave of his wand, but stopped midway. The heavy, thunderstorm air shouldered in.

Harry took a deep breath, sensing the mountains, the trees, and at the bottom of it, the deep, fertile smell of the lake. He had chosen not to go home this summer. He preferred not to take up an extra bedroom at twelve Grimmauld Place, where his granddaughter, Adeline, lived with her husband and sons, or at the lovely chateau where Lily and her large, exuberant, French family resided. Hogwarts was his home. More than the Burrow, more, even, than the London house he had inherited from his godfather. He hadn't walked in London for longer than he could remember; he doubted he would recognize the place.

What was home? It was more than a birthplace. It was more than the place where blood relatives dwelled, as Harry had painful cause to know. Home was the place where a man was taken not at face value, but at his true measure. Where nothing about him was ignored or glossed over, where he could become his most complete self.

Harry felt the nibble and gnaw of the words in his mind, demanding to be written down. Usually, he kept a quill in the jar at his bedside, but it was missing. He paged through the shuffle of books and magazines on the bed, knocking some to the floor. Their cover wizards complained, but Harry ignored them. Finding no quills, he pulled on a black dressing gown. With some effort, he descended the spiral stairs to his office.

Out of respect for his forerunners, for Neville, Minerva, and Dumbledore himself, he hadn't changed anything in his single year as Headmaster. Their sleeping images ringed the curved stone walls, both those he had known in life, and those whom he had met only through their portraits.

The last frame, hanging back in the corner, held the ageless face of Severus Snape. That familiar, acerbic voice often threw Harry into a frantic state, thinking wildly of where he might have left his Potions homework. Harry and his friends had fought to have that portrait included among the Headmasters. Some days, he dearly wished he hadn't.

Pale brush strokes shifted as Snape's flat, black eyes followed him around the office. "Can't sleep, Professor Potter?"

"Looking for a quill, that's all."

The portrait face smirked. "The famous Potter, elder statesman of the wizarding world, penning his memoirs?"

"I don't suppose you'll help me shop them around when they're finished? I'm sure your portrait at the Ministry could get me an ear."

Snape made a disgusted noise and stepped sideways out of his frame. Harry grinned. Instead of fighting with the canvas-bound echo, Harry had come upon the new strategy of cheerfully agreeing with everything Snape said. Harry thought his present method annoyed Snape even more, and something in that was deeply satisfying.

"Happy birthday, Harry," said a laughing voice behind him.

"Neville," Harry said gladly, "You remembered. Thanks, mate."

Neville's round, pale face, creased with laugh and worry lines alike, was as anxious as it had been in their first years at Hogwarts. What was left of his sandy hair clustered around his ears, mingled freely with silver. "You holding up all right?"

"Yeah, I'm okay. Thanks." Harry sank into the purple wing chair closest to Neville's portrait. "Just thinking about Ginny."

"She did always like to make a big deal out of your birthdays."

"She made a big deal out of everything."

Neville smiled down at him. "I remember when we used to take the kids to Quidditch games. Hannah didn't want our kids to sit near Ginny. They picked up some terrible words from her."

Harry laughed. "You never told me that! She got more worked up over Quidditch than anything else. But when James and Al started copying her 'special' words, Ginny had them eating soap faster than you could blink."

"Ginny Scourgified her own kids?"

"Yeah, and she wouldn't stop at the grandkids, either, if their mums and dads weren't looking." Harry flipped to the middle of a photo album, its red-and-gold cover inlaid with a Gryffindor crest. "See?" He held the album close to Neville's frame.

A furious James Sirius Potter chased Ginny into the frame. He was carrying a little girl with dark, curly pigtails. Propelled by hysterical laughter, bubbles flew from the child's mouth as if from a Muggle car-washing brush. The snapshot looped back and forth, never changing. "I think that's little Adeline, but it could be her sister. It's hard to tell through all that foam."

Under the photograph album lay a beautifully illuminated invitation. Harry picked it up, read it, rolled it back up, and sealed it again. His granddaughters were throwing a hundred-and-first birthday party at the Burrow, Teddy and Victoire's place. Hermione was living there, too. Even in his self-imposed isolation, the party rumors had Harry cringing. Why did they have to invite the Minister of Magic? Why were trained dragons going to fly over the garden when the cake came out? Embarrassed, Harry had begged off.

"Aren't you going to the party?" Neville asked. "I heard it was really going to be something."

Harry smiled. Portraits were bigger gossips than third-year girls. "No, I think I'll stay home and write. I've gotten a lot of ideas sketched out tonight. Wouldn't the kids like a real book about their Gram and me?"

Phineas Nigellus Black made a retching noise. He had never quite gotten over Harry inheriting his family fortune. Insult was compounded by dire injury as Harry and Ginny filled their home with a burgeoning number of half-Weasleys.

"You haven't got that much to brag about, Potter. All you did was knock down a Dark wizard who got too big for his britches. Never exactly thanked you for that, myself. He had some good ideas."

"Professor Black!" Neville reprimanded.

"That will be quite enough, Phineas." Professor McGonagall gave Black a withering stare, and he subsided, grumbling under his breath.

"Hi, Minerva. How are you this evening?"

Professor McGonagall waved off Harry's pleasantries. "Ginny was a lovely woman. It's quite proper to mourn her, but it's been nearly a year. You can't stay in this tower for the rest of your life, talking to pictures on the walls."

"You're my friends."

Professor McGonagall puffed up in anger, dislodging her tartan night cap from her head. Harry dropped his quill in surprise. Thick, black ink spread all over the page. Harry tried his best to clear it up with his wand, before his thoughts were lost forever. "Don't waste your real life, Harry. You'll be up here with us soon enough."

"Great," came Snape's grumbling baritone. The Potions professor remained outside his frame, but his voice was clear. "Don't let them hang you next to me."

McGonagall rounded on him. "Shut up, Severus. Harry _has_ a mortal life. He has a flesh-and-blood family, and they deserve his time. You think that a _book_ is more valuable than a grandfather? How about a photograph album?"

Harry half-expected Neville to have shrunk behind the sheltering bars of his frame, but his round, creased face bore a ferocious expression. "We're not even our true selves, Harry. We're just products of a very fancy charm. Even Professor Snape. Don't waste your time on us."

Albus Dumbledore's painted fingers rubbed drowsily at his spectacles. He held them up to the light, and clucked at a persistent smudge. He cleaned them again and replaced them midway down his long, crooked nose. "Professor McGonagall and Professor Longbottom are quite correct."

"Hi, Professor." Harry looked guiltily at the portrait. "Sorry we disturbed you."

Professor Dumbledore laughed. "Harry, if you're sorry for disturbing the effects of a 'fancy charm,' as Neville so aptly put it, then you have problems I may not be able to assist you with."

Elderly Neville looked flustered. Severus Snape's young face twisted into an amused grimace. Harry was unaccountably angry.

"You have to go," Snape said abruptly. "I didn't preserve your life all those times for you to blight it on your own power. If it's uncomfortable for you, think of it as an assignment. _Life_ is your assignment, Potter. Take it from one who didn't truly understand the terms when they were given."

Harry suddenly understood. Everything else dropped away, and he felt pared down, nothing but the essence of himself remaining. With the portraits, he could be a student again, a child to be protected, even when despised. His responsibilities were lightened, his grief sent forward to another world, where the years cushioned him from the coming storm. He covered his eyes with his fingertips.

"Are you okay, Harry?" came Neville's timid voice.

"I'm fine. You know, it's not just my birthday today. Hagrid showed up the day I turned eleven. Busted down the Muggles' door, literally broke it down, and brought this into my life." Harry turned the ancient holly and phoenix-feather wand in his fingers. "I think I'll use it a while longer."

Dumbledore's portrait beamed. "That's the spirit."

Harry heard an impatient rustle from the window, and was surprised to see a wind-rumpled owl standing on the ledge. It was nearly blown away before Harry untied the envelope from its leg. The owl made an exit so prompt, Harry looked down in alarm at the envelope in his hand. It was red. Harry shook the envelope open and let the shrieking paper fly down the side of the tower. He should have known that Hermione would never give up on him.

Harry grabbed the fallen quill, ink bottle, and a scrap of discarded parchment from the floor where they had fallen.

_Hermione,_

_Some birthday card! I'm coming to the party, if Teddy's still having it. Got a lot to talk with you about. Tell them I'll Floo over in the morning._

_Love,  
__Harry._


End file.
